Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

I want to indicate that Labor will be supporting the government’s amendments. I said as much in my speech in the second reading debate. To be frank, to be dealing with substantive amendments in this way, and given the complexity of the issues we are talking about, a half-day inquiry and a reference on a Thursday for an inquiry on a Friday to report on the Monday is really just not good enough. It is not just that it is an abuse of the Senate processes; it limits the ability of the community to understand what is being done to their PBS.

Senator Moore is absolutely right. We in Australia value our PBS very much. When we are going to change it, I think our responsibility is to take the community with us and not just throw things together quickly at the end, as we seem to have been doing here this morning. Three different ministers have sat in that chair since we started debating this. When we started the committee stage, we did not know who to ask the questions of. That is no way to run a parliament and it is no way to run the PBS. We want to be assured that changes that we make to the PBS will in fact achieve the outcomes that the government is expressing that it desires.

As a former full member of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, and now a participating member of the committee, I am very proud of the work it has done. We have been able to look at issues objectively and come up with very sensible suggestions. It is not a committee that has worked in a political way for a very long time. To give the committee only half a day for its inquiry—and during a time when the Senate was sitting, so when divisions occurred we had to move out and then come back in—made it very difficult for the members of that committee and the secretariat to really understand such complex legislation.

We have had a look at the government’s amendments. We think that they probably—and ‘probably’ is no way to be making policy—will deliver the intended outcomes. We will be supporting them. But I say again to the government: if your credibility as policymakers is not going to be questioned in the future then, I am sorry, but these sorts of Senate processes will not do legislation justice.